1. Field
Certain aspects of the present disclosure generally relate to wireless communications and, more particularly, to a method and an apparatus for unified iterative decoding in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and non-MIMO wireless systems.
2. Background
Current demodulation architectures treat multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and non-MIMO wireless systems in different data paths. For example, the log-likelihood ratio (LLR) mapping unit is typically used to process a scalar channel in the case of non-MIMO system, while the symbol equalization (SEQ), the joint LLR extraction or any of its simplified versions such as the Max-Log maximum a posteriori (Max-Log MAP) decoding is employed for processing MIMO channels. Such hardware redundancy wastes implementation area, increases computational complexity and power consumption of a wireless receiver.
Iterative demodulation-decoding structure can be used at the receiver to enhance error rate performance. However, current demodulation architectures do not support unified iterative decoding for both MIMO and non-MIMO wireless systems. On the other hand, a hard/soft serial interference cancellation (SIC) structure supports iterative processing, but this particular scheme works only for MIMO wireless systems.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a unified iterative demodulation structure that uniformly supports both non-MIMO and MIMO wireless systems.